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A Fresh Look at Power Lines, Cancer and the Dread-to-Risk Ratio

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A Fresh Look at Power Lines, Cancer and the Dread-to-Risk Ratio

By Andrew C. Revkin December 1, 2014 9:08 amDecember 1, 2014 9:08 am

The folks at Retro Report, which takes a fresh look at past events that garnered lots of media attention, have taken on “Power Line Fears” in their latest video report. The piece examines a burst of media coverage and public panic after some studies hinted at raised childhood leukemia risk near power lines nearly a quarter century ago. Paul Brodeur’s “Annals of Radiation” coverage in the New Yorker was a memorable part of the story. But the networks enthusiastically jumped on board, as well.

How has the science played out? The Retro Report piece finds no evidence in more recent science of anything approaching a public health concern, and ample evidence that the early burst of scary proclamations and press coverage had a lasting effect on public perceptions. There’s a persistently high “dread to risk” ratio (as with other related phenomena).

Have a look at the report here:

Video

Power Line Fears

News media coverage in the 1980s and early 1990s fueled fears of a national cancer epidemic caused by power lines and generated a debate that still lingers today.

The Times has a companion story by Clyde Haberman. Here’s a snippet and link:

In the late 1980s, palpable dread gripped parts of the country after reports that clusters of cancer had developed among children whose families lived near high-voltage power lines. Parents in those places panicked at the very thought that an object that made so much of modern life possible — an electrical distribution line — was a potential menace to their loved ones. They were hardly put at ease by findings like those from David A. Savitz, an epidemiologist who was at the University of North Carolina back then and is now at Brown University. He concluded that children who lived near power lines were twice as likely to develop cancer as those who did not, because of the electromagnetic fields the lines created.

But as the years passed, other scientists looked at this issue more closely, and then more closely still. They could not find a pervasive public health peril. Indeed, a committee of the National Research Council, the operating arm of the National Academy of Sciences, reported in 1996 [link] that it had found no persuasive evidence that household appliances or power transmission lines presented a threat. Even Professor Savitz came around to a conclusion that, as he said to Retro Report, “it’s quite questionable whether these fields cause leukemia at all.”

According to statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, one in every 20,000 American children is at risk of getting leukemia. (A child is defined here as a boy or girl age 14 or under.) Proximity to a power line, researchers agree, might raise those odds to two in 20,000. Imagine a packed house of children at Madison Square Garden, which has a capacity just shy of 20,000 for a basketball game. Statistically, the likelihood is that one of them has leukemia. If fears about electromagnetic fields are realized, one additional boy or girl in that large arena may be affected. Is that a tragedy for those children and their families? Of course. But with numbers so small, does it suggest a health crisis?

The story notes that fears of power line effects still fuel “not in my backyard” opposition to transmission lines:

[P]rotests against new overhead power lines continue across the country — scientific conclusions be damned — from upstate New York [related story], to Illinois and on to Washington State. Once a bell of fear is rung, it seems exceedingly difficult to unring it. Nor does fright have to be in sync with objective reality. [Please read the rest.]

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By 2050 or so, the human population is expected to pass nine billion. Those billions will be seeking food, water and other resources on a planet where humans are already shaping climate and the web of life. Dot Earth was created by Andrew Revkin in October 2007 -- in part with support from a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship -- to explore ways to balance human needs and the planet's limits.